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NWLSA Student Awards 2015

The North West London Society of Architects (NWLSA) panel attend presentations by undergraduate and postgraduate students for annual NWLSA Student Awards 2015.

Ed Dale-Harris

Unit 6, Year 5: 'Reconciliation through making'

Nadine Coetzee

Free Unit, Year 4: The Land that no one wants

Emily Wheeler

Studio 3. Year 3: Community Cycle Hub

InterAct

Studio 10, Year 3: Common Ground

The jury will award one undergraduate and one postgraduate prize with £200 each. The projects selected demonstrate community engagement with real clients and how quality design can be combined with excellent social engagement and entrepreneurship.

The following students and projects have been selected and will be presented:

Emily Wheeler, Studio 3. Year 3: Community Cycle Hub

This bike themed project began with a single functioning bicycle, adapted so that from stationary elevated position it rotated the handle on a music box when pedalled. It was tested on the community action day, in the courtyard of the Hesa Medical Centre in Hayes, with users being encouraged to have a go creating a novel childlike interactive distraction from the daily routine. This informed the development of the suggested building to be a Community Cycle Hub, offering recycling and maintaining of bikes, local bike hire and fitness courses.

The reuse of discarded bikes evolved to be considered as the structural material of the fabric of the building itself. The 1:1 element shows the potential of joining frames to each other from different fixing points on bicycles producing a rigid skeletal frame to which cladding can be fixed. This exhibition piece has found a new home in a small cinema used as a venue for University of the Third Age, screening vintage films. The structure will be repainted and clad with varying types of wire mesh, backed by coloured glass. This will come together to form the front façade of the porch and staging area to the cinema.

InterAct, Studio 10, Year 3: Common ground

InterAct collective is a newly formed teaching platform for transdisciplinary teaching between art and architecture. The common ground where the disciplines come together is a small site on the Roman road in Bow, London. The site will be a hub for students to explore how to develop and influence development of a high street from the bottom up. Culture and art is usually used by the capitalist system to regenerate in line with the market. InterAct aims to use art and culture to slow the process down and construct resilience in development. The students have constructed two key components of the site this year, namely Roman Road Besetka and the threshold to the site and have gained planning consent to occupy the site with their structures for the next three years.

Nadine Coetzee, Free Unit, Year 4: The land that no one wants

The Cape Flats, Cape Town, South Africa is home to a large marginalised community and a highly endangered natural habitat. Both are defined by the local clime - the expertly adapted flora and fauna and a community battling against the elements. The growth of the community leaves the expertly adapted flora increasingly at risk, threatening the potential of symbiosis. This project tests this potential through a set of overlooked plots of land in the township of Kraaifontein. Each plot is linked to a member of this community who I have worked with to develop a proposal that ties program and planting to create an urbanism endemic to the Cape Flats.

Ed Dale-Harris, Unit 6, Year 5: 'Reconciliation through making'

Project 1: A House for a Victim (Live) - Ed spent eight weeks on site building a compressed earth block (CEB) house with recently-released prisoners and some of the families of their victims. The project was instigated by Ed and the Ntarama House Building Cooperative, to facilitate development and peace-building in post genocide Rwanda. The cooperative was set up by REACH, a local reconciliation focused charity, to help reintegrate perpetrators back into their community, by enabling them to build homes for victims of the genocide.

Project 2: Arete Market Place - In the emergent town of Arete, a conglomeration of four satellite villages, REACH and Ed created a brief to incrementally grow a marketplace, made up of a series of REACH’s cooperatives and micro businesses. This creates a new focal point to the town, and provides spaces for reconciliation and the exchange of ‘food’. The process of its creation supports community integration.